GOP 2016ers: Government shutdown no 'Souljah' moment

Nearly everyone in the 2016 GOP presidential field agrees: A government shutdown is a no-good, very bad thing.

Yet with the lights-out moment for federal agencies now under way, the leading Republican White House hopefuls have all but zipped their lips when it comes to calling out the Hill gamesmanship that is poised to shutter agencies across the U.S. government for the first time in nearly two decades.

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Shutdown: Who's to blame?

The incoming GOP presidential class has talked about a shutdown like you’d talk about a bad thunderstorm: it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, but there’s not much to be done about it and it’s awfully hard to hand out blame.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told CBS over the weekend that a shutdown “by definition, is a failure” and said that “responsible Republican leaders” aren’t pushing for that outcome. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal have both expressed opposition to the idea of a shutdown, while even Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul – who has vowed to oppose legislation that funds Obamacare – called closing down the government a “dumb idea.”

To the surprise and frustration of some party leaders in Washington, what no one in the GOP pack has done, to date, is truly take a rhetorical two-by-four to the congressional Republicans who have refused to pass a so-called “clean” continuing resolution that would keep the government open – and authorize spending for the Affordable Care Act.

This would seem to be a perfect moment for someone in the GOP to deliver an abrupt rebuke to the legislators – including “defund Obamacare” champion Ted Cruz, himself a 2016 prospect – whom many Republicans blame for making the party so harshly confrontational, conservative and just plain unpopular.

The problem, Republicans freely acknowledge, is that even leaders who believe the party must rebrand or move to the middle recognize that the right holds extraordinary sway over presidential nominating contests, perhaps even more so than the left did in the Democratic Party back in the 1980s, before Bill Clinton and other centrist Democrats took control.

So for now, the 2016 field, like much of the rest of the professional Republican community, is stuck hoping that the party will learn a lesson on its own if and when the approach that has brought the country to a shutdown appears to backfire. The strategy, if one call call it that, is akin to hoping a toddler will only stick her finger in a light socket once.

“This was a dead-end policy from the start,” fumed New York Rep. Peter King, an outspoken critic of his party’s right flank who has said he may run for president in 2016.

King, a kind of Howard Beale for electability-minded Republicans, called the whole defund-slash-shutdown push a “con-man routine” and expressed dismay that others in his party won’t come out and say so.

“Maybe they’re afraid of offending the base or maybe they’re afraid of offending Ted Cruz. I have no idea,” King said. “People are looking for a leader. They know it’s wrong, they know it’s crazy. But it’s like ‘The Wizard of Oz’: nobody wants to say that there’s nothing behind the curtain.”

Republican pollster Christine Matthews – who advised Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor known for his fiscal straight talk – emphasized that many governors “have gone on record to say that it’s irresponsible and that government should work it out, not shut down.”

“I’m not sure any of them wants to grab the flag and run with it, but, when asked, are pretty unequivocal that they think it’s dumb and irresponsible and not what they would do if in that situation,” she said.

For their own political purposes, that kind of criticism may be enough for Christie, Walker, Jindal and the rest of the outside-the-Beltway 2016 gang. Simply by criticizing the idea of a shutdown, they may have inoculated themselves against the kind of damage that their D.C.-based competitors could face in the event that a shutdown turns into a real political rout.

Indeed, each of the most prominent senators who may be angling for the Republican presidential nomination – Cruz, Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio – are squarely in step with the “defund” movement.

If the goal is merely to gain a political leg up on senators who have helped trigger a shutdown – well, not being a U.S. senator who votes for a shutdown may accomplish that on its own.

Among Republicans concerned about their party’s positioning for the 2016 election, however, there’s a broader concern: that regardless of his personal resume, the next GOP presidential nominee will be seriously hobbled by a party brand defined by politically reckless members of Congress.

Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, shrugged at the notion that a new spirit of legislative bipartisanship could come from presidential candidates outside Washington.